And I who have been Virgin and Aphrodite,
The mourning Isis and the queen of corn
Wait for the last mummer, dread Persephone
To dance my dust at last into the tomb.
-Kathleen Raine
If we do not allow the malignant fear of death to pervade our minds, we will instinctively extract every sweetness out of life, even at the moment of actual dying. Timothy Miller's book How to Want What You Have tells the story of a man who, in traveling across a field in the jungle, encountered a tiger. When he tried to flee, the tiger ran after him. When the frightened man came to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. As the tiger sniffed at him from above, the trembling man looked down to where, far below, a second tiger was waiting to attack him. He had only the vine to sustain him. Suddenly, he noticed a luscious strawberry growing on a branch near him. He grasped the vine with one hand and vigorously plucked the strawberry with the other. It tasted especially sweet.
For a patient of mine this story sounded totally absurd. "What difference would it make to taste the sweetness of a strawberry while you are about to plunge into your death? It is like asking a dead man walking what he would like to have as his last meal. I would ask for nothing! Well, maybe a wild mushroom omelette. What is a few more minutes, hours, or even days?" Because he couldn't live forever, he wasn't appreciating the moment. But eternity is made of moments. I dared to repeat the story told by Prince Myshkin, based on the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevski's own experience:
This man had once been led out with the others to the scaffold
And a sentence of death was read over him...Twenty minutes
later a reprieve was read to them, and they were condemned
to another punishment instead. Yet the interval between those two
sentences, twenty minutes or at least a quarter of an hour, he
passed in the fullest conviction that he would die in a few minutes...
He said that nothing was so dreadful at that time as the
continual thought, "What if I were not to die! What if I could go
back to life-what eternity! And it would all be mine! I would
turn every minute into an age; I would lose nothing, I would
count every minute as it passed, I would not waste one!"
The patient apparently knew the story; he was listening with a grin on his face. As soon as I finished he shouted, "But, my good doctor, the story doesn't end with Myshkin wishing to live forever. That fury of time actually got him to the point that he longed to be shot very quickly. You see, I don't long to die quickly or slowly. I want longevity, real physical longevity, not your psychological longevity."
He missed the point of the story-the man wanted to die in order to capture permanently that exaltation of the moment before he was to die. The meaning of death is precisely its relation to the value of life. My patient was wasting his precious living time by his preoccupation with dying.
T. Byram Karasu, M.D. author of The Art of Serenity
